Deadliest Sea (27 page)

Eric had climbed over Pete and turned him over to try to get some of the water out. He told the men to cut off their officers’ clothes, and sent people for knives and blankets. Eric noticed a sizable wound on Pete’s arm, and sent a crewman to find some first aid materials to wrap it up. There was no blood, just exposed muscle. Eric worried that if Pete’s body warmed up, the cut might start bleeding. Better to take care of it now.

Within a few minutes, the crew had the two lifeless men out of their clothes and wrapped in blankets. They started massaging their limbs, trying to warm them up. Eric ran up to the wheelhouse, looking for a portable defibrillator.

There wasn’t one.

“Should we try CPR?” Eric asked Captain Scott.

The two men decided it was worth a try.

Eric rushed to recruit a group of people to work on the lifeless men. There was some reluctance—it seemed pretty clear to everyone that the officers were dead.

“We have to do this!” Eric told the crew.

Observer Beth Dubofsky began CPR on Captain Pete. It seemed like she was one of the only people on board who had recent CPR certification. She didn’t have a mouth guard and the captain looked far gone. His arm was broken and Beth could
see some bone sticking out. There were no signs of life, but Beth kept at it.

Meanwhile, Eric was repeating compressions into Dan’s chest when a third body was carried into the factory. There was vomit on the man’s face. His brown eyes were glazed over. Like with the other fishermen, the crew removed his clothes and wrapped him in blankets. David Hull recognized the man. It was one of the new guys, Byron Carrillo.

David wiped away the vomit and began CPR on Byron. Only a couple days earlier, David had noticed that the greenhorn, while a hard worker, was having trouble distinguishing between different types of fish on the processing table. David had pulled Byron aside and offered him some pointers. Later, Byron put his arm around David up in the galley. “This guy is my teacher,” he had said. Jesus, David thought, that was only twelve hours ago. Now he was standing over Byron, pushing water out of the poor guy’s body.

“Pump down on his chest. Hard! Fifteen times—and don’t worry if you feel a rib pop or crack,” Eric instructed David. Beth was standing nearby. The current recommendation was thirty compressions, the fisheries observer told them.

The men decided to go with Beth’s number. David did thirty reps, then mouth to mouth. Eric was doing the same on Dan Cook, with a
Warrior
crewman doing the breathing. Over and over. They just kept working.

The men were telling him to stop, but David Hull didn’t want to give up on Byron. It just didn’t seem fair that he would be the one who didn’t make it. For Christ’s sake, he’d only been in Alaska for one damn week.

David had been at it for probably fifteen minutes when the
Warrior
’s first mate, Ray Falante, ordered him to stop. There was no hope, Ray told David.

Byron was dead.

J
ulio Morales had never been inside a helicopter before. From his seat on the cold metal floor, he couldn’t see much of anything outside the cabin. His sweatpants and sweatshirt were wet underneath his torn survival suit. And he couldn’t stop shaking. His whole body was so numb he was sure he wouldn’t feel the knife if someone stabbed him in the leg.

Julio had been the last of the three in the raft to be pulled up to the Jayhawk. The rescue swimmer sent Sam up first. Mark went next. Then Julio had climbed into the basket, making sure his arms and head stayed inside, like the swimmer instructed. The ride had been fast. Julio couldn’t wait to get out of the basket. As soon as it was pulled into the cabin and tilted on its side, he crawled right out and found a spot next to Sam.

Once all of them were inside the chopper, the big Samoan
man peeled off his survival suit’s red hood, freeing a huge, springy afro. One of the pilots had to tell Sam to move; his hair was obstructing their view. It was kind of funny, actually. For the first time, Julio felt like everything was going to be okay.

The pilots had spotted another strobe light as they were hovering over the Dolphin’s life raft. Once Abe Heller was safely in the cabin, they taxied straight to the light. The person was in a survival suit and floating faceup in the water, the attached strobe flickering on and off amid the waves. They settled forty feet overhead. This fisherman, the pilots saw, wasn’t waving up at them like most of the others had.

Julio couldn’t hear what the pilots were saying over the roar of the rotors, but he could tell they weren’t leaving yet. They were still looking. Julio could see flashes of ocean outside the open aircraft door. It was still dark, but he knew morning would be there soon. Julio watched as Jayhawk rescue swimmer O’Brien Starr-Hollow clipped his harness into the end of the hoist cable. What’s he doing? Julio wondered. The rescuer wasn’t bringing the basket with him.

The helo crew wanted to move quickly, so they used the rescue strop instead of the basket. As Bonn held the aircraft steady over the fisherman, McLaughlin once again called out the size and frequency of the swells for flight mechanic Rob DeBolt. They were still dealing with huge waves that made it difficult to keep a constant eye on objects in the ocean beneath them.

As soon as Starr-Hollow swung out of the helo, McLaughlin glanced over his left shoulder. The
Alaska Warrior
was headed right at them—and bearing down fast.

The big black boat was shockingly close, its bow pitching in the seas. The top of the
Warrior
’s massive gantry was at about the same height as the aircraft.

Jesus, McLaughlin, thought. They don’t see us.

The Jayhawk was sixty-five feet from head to tail—almost a third the length of the ship. Still, in these weather conditions, the helo might be hard to spot. And, most likely, everyone on that boat had their eyes glued to the surface of the water. They would be scanning the swells for bodies—just like the aircrew had been doing minutes before. No one was standing watch for obstacles in the air.

McLaughlin grabbed the radio.

“
Alaska Warrior!
You’re headed right for us!” he yelled.

With the swimmer already out the cabin door and a man in the water below, it wasn’t an easy option to just fly the aircraft out of the way.

McLaughlin kept watching the ship, waiting for it to turn. Within a couple of long seconds, it swerved out of the way of the hovering helicopter.

The pilot exhaled. Thank God, he thought. A massive ship like the
Warrior
could have knocked his aircraft right out of the sky.

I
N THE BACK OF THE CABIN
, Julio was oblivious to the near collision with the
Warrior
. His eyes were on the flight mechanic kneeling at the open door. Just a couple minutes after the swimmer descended out of sight, Julio saw the top of his yellow helmet rise back above the floor of the chopper. He had a man secured in a harness in front of him. It took only a few seconds before the swimmer was back in the cabin, but there was a struggle to pull the fisherman fully inside. DeBolt, Starr-Hollow, and Heller were all at the open door, trying to maneuver the guy into the helicopter. The man was lifeless, his legs hanging down
below the floor of the helo. Finally, the swimmer reached out with a knife, and made two big slits through the shins of the man’s survival suit to drain out the water.

Julio stared as the large man was pulled through the opening and laid down on the slick, wet floor of the cabin. There were ice crystals on his face. Oh shit, Julio thought. He looked at the frozen mustache, the glazed-over eyes. The man had foam at his mouth. His skin looked blue. He was dead, Julio knew it.

It was the first mate, David Silveira. Julio and the other fishermen knew him as “Captain David.”

The three rescued crewmen were quiet. They looked at the body.

Julio thought about his conversations with the mate in his first weeks on the ship. He had told the older man about his experience as a marine electrician back in Long Beach, California. David was from California, too—San Diego—and also from a big Catholic family. He had been encouraging and had even offered to help Julio find a full-time job as an electrician in Dutch Harbor.

Julio had liked the idea of it. So far, he loved Alaska. Maybe he could make a life for himself on the island. David had been kind to him. He was a boss on the boat, but he’d acted like he really cared about a new guy like Julio. It was terrible, seeing him like this.

Julio was relieved when one of the Coast Guard crew pulled a blanket over David’s face.

U
P FRONT, THE PILOTS WERE STILL STUDYING
the waves below for signs of life. By their count, three people were still missing. They knew the
Warrior
had already recovered twenty-two
people from two life rafts. The pilots saw one of the tented rafts bobbing in the waves. They swooped down to thirty feet to get a good look inside the open door, but the raft was empty. Soon after they found two more. Same thing. There were no more lights in the sea. They looked for red survival suits. Nothing.

The big guy with the afro, Sam, was still in pretty bad shape. Abe Heller had informed the Jayhawk crew that another one of the rescued men, Mark Hagerman, had diabetes. Heller wasn’t doing too well himself. The Jayhawk crew could tell the Dolphin’s swimmer would be fine, but he was obviously cold and had been puking in the back of the helo. McLaughlin and Bonn decided it was best to get everyone back to the ship as soon as possible.

Daylight broke at 9:07
A.M
. But as the orange-and-white-striped chopper skimmed over the Bering Sea, the horizon brightened only from black to gray. There was no sun in sight. The men took off their night vision goggles and squinted into the continuing snow squalls as the helo hurtled north toward the Coast Guard cutter.

D
OWN ON THE
M
UNRO
’
S MESS DECK
, “Doc” Chuck Weiss’s crew was running on adrenaline. It was almost 9:30
A.M
. Most of the Coasties had been up since shortly after 3:00
A.M
. They hadn’t felt hungry as they waited the long hours for the first survivors, but Weiss had encouraged them to eat. Now they were thankful for the eggs, toast, cereal, and fruit they’d shoveled in hours before.

Finally, they got the word: The 60 Jayhawk was en route to the ship with four survivors on board. One was in critical condition. The smaller 65 Dolphin had just taken off from the flight deck a few minutes before—without a swimmer. The deck
was clear for the 60 to lower the new survivors. As the larger helo came into a hover above the flight deck for a second time, Weiss’s crew was ready.

Meanwhile, deep inside the ship, the first fishermen to be rescued had settled into one of the
Munro
’s TV lounges. The rec deck was designed like a mini movie theater, with a dozen cushioned, reclining seats arranged on tiers like in a high-end cinema. In front was a flat-screen TV. A couple of the men had picked
The Guardian
from the ship’s collection of DVDs. The 2006 film stars Ashton Kutcher and Kevin Costner as Coast Guard rescue swimmers. A few guys had been talking about the movie as they stood on the deck of the sinking
Ranger
just hours before. Now it was almost like they’d lived it. Of course there’d been a copy on board the
Munro
.

The TVs in the
Munro
’s lounges could also be set to the real-time video camera on the flight deck. At 9:40
A.M
., three hours after the first and largest group of
Ranger
crewmen had been lowered to the cutter, the rescued fishermen heard the piped announcement that the 60 Jayhawk was about to lower more survivors to the ship. They turned the station to the grainy black-and-white image of the
Munro
’s stern. The rescued fishermen clapped when they saw Sam being led across the ship’s deck. There was no mistaking that giant afro.

Julio Morales landed on the flight deck in the basket next and was immediately surrounded. He stood up, and the water inside his oversized suit drained to his feet. The
Munro
crew carried him across the deck, the waterlogged legs of his Gumby suit dragging along behind.

Julio was shivering uncontrollably. He was still being stripped out of his suit and wrapped with hot towels as David Silveira was lowered from the open door of the Jayhawk. The mate was delivered in a seated position, his upper body slumped over his legs
inside the basket. Several of the
Munro
’s crew struggled to carry Silveira to the starboard side of the flight deck, where he was transferred to a litter, then brought into the vestibule at the rear of the hangar, where Weiss and a team of EMTs were waiting.

The
Munro
’s crew didn’t know what kind of emergency care Silveira had received on the helo, or exactly how long he’d been out of the water. They’d just been told that his condition was critical. They laid the litter on the vestibule floor and checked for a pulse. There was none. Water sloshed out onto the floor as they sliced into Silveira’s survival suit. Weiss saw sea foam drool from the man’s mouth. His eyes were glassy. He looked dead.

Weiss had received his Coast Guard medical training in Petaluma, California, where he was instructed by Dr. Martin Nemiroff—the Coast Guard’s Mr. Miyagi of hypothermia and near drowning. Weiss and his classmates had been lectured on the possibilities for resuscitating cold-water drowning victims. Nemiroff had recounted stories of individuals who had been submerged for a full hour in cold, clean water and later revived without brain damage. “Nobody’s dead until they’re warm and dead,” was one of the doctor’s favorite sayings. Nemiroff’s stories sounded like incredible, one-in-a-thousand-type cases. But the doctor’s own research showed that they weren’t as miraculous as they might seem. Over the years, he’d catalogued more than two thousand cold-water deaths or near deaths—many of them from his time with the Coast Guard in Alaska. It sometimes takes a full hour of CPR, Nemiroff told the students, but half of the time cold-water drowning victims can be successfully revived.

“Doc” Weiss found Nemiroff’s stories powerful—and convincing. Just because the man in front of him now didn’t have a pulse or any other signs of life, didn’t mean there was no hope, Weiss concluded. His job was to do everything he could to bring the man back.

Weiss brushed away the sea foam from Silveira’s face and placed a sanitary mouth guard used for CPR over the mate’s lips. He gave Silveira two breaths and then a crew member linked her fingers together, placed her palms flat just below Silveira’s sternum, locked her elbows straight, and began the first of a set of thirty compressions. Silveira was a large man with a broad chest. Weiss estimated he weighed close to 200 pounds. The
Munro
’s doc had never needed to give CPR in a real emergency before, and Silveira was much bigger than the dummies used in training classes. Weiss was surprised by how much energy it took. They needed to get a good two-inch compression with each pump and keep the speed up—the recommended rate was one hundred compressions a minute. The effort required was almost like doing thirty high-speed push-ups, then another thirty, and another. Every few minutes, the person on compressions had to swap out.

They went through five cycles of two breaths and thirty pumps. Then they checked again for a pulse. Nothing. A crew member brought the ship’s automated external defibrillator, and they placed it on the fisherman’s bare chest. The device listens for a pulse that may be too faint for rescuers to detect and administers an electric shock when a sign of life is identified. But there was nothing to detect. “Continue CPR” the recorded voice on the defibrillator instructed. Two breaths. Thirty thrusts. Again and again, Weiss’s team kept at it.

A
S THE
M
UNRO
’
S MEDICS ATTENDED TO
the new group of fishermen, Dolphin rescue swimmer Abe Heller was on the mess deck warming up with a hot drink. He was feeling better. He’d stopped shivering and had washed the taste of vomit from his
mouth. Heller thought that after a few more minutes he’d be good to go out again if needed.

Dolphin pilot TJ Schmitz had a different idea. From the air, the Jayhawk pilots had passed on the news that Schmitz’s swimmer, Heller, who’d stayed behind in the raft, was fairly hypothermic. Schmitz thought that maybe his aircraft could come back to the ship and get Jayhawk swimmer O’Brien Starr-Hollow instead. Starr-Hollow was eager to go. There were still people who were unaccounted for in the sea. They could have spent longer searching the scene, the swimmer thought. Plus, it was pretty amazing to get the chance to work out of two different airframes during the same rescue. Starr-Hollow had never heard of it happening before.

After the last fisherman had been loaded out of the helicopter, Starr-Hollow, too, was sent down on the hoist line. The Jayhawk flew off to the side of the ship as the Dolphin came back into view and landed once again on the
Munro
’s flight deck. With the rotors still running, Starr-Hollow ran to the open door and climbed inside, and the Dolphin took off. Then the Jayhawk came back into a hover—and DeBolt sent the cable down for the HIFR hose. This time, they’d get a full load of fuel.